The constant need to generate more money to pay off earlier investors eventually leads to critical mass, and the venture implodes. Before then, there comes a tipping point, a time when the threshold is crossed and the fraud becomes too big to keep feeding it with fresh investor dollars, according to people familiar with such schemes.

Now in federal custody, the disbarred Fort Lauderdale lawyer is charged with peddling bogus legal settlements since at least 2005. If convicted, Rothstein could be sentenced to 100 years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

Court documents suggest the $1.2 billion scheme he reportedly created began slowly but built to tremendous momentum last year. By this past March, Rothstein appears to have sensed his impending doom and was grasping for large chunks of cash.

That month, he allegedly forged federal court documents to persuade a longtime client – auto dealership magnate Ed Morse, whom he represented in a civil suit against an interior decorator – to deposit $15 million into a Rothstein trust account. Morse had already wired nearly $38 million to the account, records show.

Rothstein used the money from his friend and client "to keep the Ponzi scheme afloat," said Jeffrey Sloman, acting U.S. Attorney for South Florida.

Bill Branscum, a former U.S. Treasury agent in Naples, called it an act of desperation.

"He is just trying to buy time," Branscum said. "They always reach a point where they realize they can't sustain what they are doing, that it is all flowing the wrong way. Then the panic sets in."

A year earlier, Rothstein, 47, was flying high. In 2008, at the peak of the scheme, he paid himself $35 million through his Fort Lauderdale law firm Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, according to court documents.

That election year, Rothstein, his businesses and associates made $2.1 million in political contributions. He was a top fundraiser for John McCain's presidential bid.

Rothstein sank $17 million into real estate in 2008, buying seven properties, including a condo in Manhattan, a 14-room waterfront estate in Rhode Island and a home in Fort Lauderdale's Harbor Beach neighborhood with a dock for his two yachts.

He kept snapping up property through January 2009, when a Rothstein corporation bought a lot across the street from his Harbor Beach home for $4 million and hired an architect to draw up plans to develop it.

Behind the scenes, records show, Rothstein was creating dozens of corporations to which he could transfer ownership of his multimillion-dollar homes and super-expensive exotic cars – a possible indication he knew time was running out on his investment venture, and that he should hide as many assets as possible from future creditors.

On a single day in January, Rothstein incorporated 16 companies in Delaware.

He became worried about his safety and that of his associates. In April, as Rothstein's largest investor group issued an offering to raise another $100 million, Rothstein hired off-duty Fort Lauderdale police officers to guard him and his house. In June, he extended the security detail to his law firm.

"We will be providing special numbers to call in the event of any security issues," Rothstein told co-workers in a June 1 e-mail. "You will see uniformed and plain clothes law enforcement present in our offices."

In July, Rothstein began shifting the titles to his properties to the Delaware corporations. The transfers continued through August and September and were nothing more than a "wealth preservation mechanism," federal prosecutors charged later.

In October, the political contributions flowing from Rothstein and his downtown Fort Lauderdale law firm dwindled to just $1,500, and Rothstein could no longer make his payments to investors. He boarded a chartered jet for Morocco on Oct. 27 and four days later reportedly sent this e-mail to an employee of his largest investment consortium: "I really just need to end it."

Rothstein's actions starting last spring "certainly fit the pattern of the frantic gyrations of a man sensing the end was near," said Mitchell Zuckoff, a Boston University journalism professor and author of Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend.

Rothstein saw "the door was closing," Zuckoff said. "These guys do often at the end become deeply desperate."

Ponzi schemes get their name from Charles Ponzi, a Boston-based con man who sold investments in coupons used to buy stamps in the 1920s, promising investors a 50 percent return in 45 days. Ponzi wasn't actually buying the coupons, but using money from new investors to pay returns to earlier investors. He eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud.

The schemes that bear his name have one thing in common, Zuckoff said.

"There is no satisfactory end," he said. "There's never going to be enough to satisfy all the customers. You're in debt from the day you begin."

Some who carry out the schemes "truly believe they will find a way to turn it legitimate, to pay everyone back," Zuckoff said. "Most go in knowing from the first this is not going to work."

If federal agents are right about what he did, Rothstein stands out from other Ponzi schemers for his very public dealings with the media, including telling a SunSentinel columnist a year ago: "I'm going to ride this wave as long as God allows."

"That strikes me as very unusual," Zuckoff said. "Most of these guys, if they are willing to talk to the press in the midst of a scam, they try to use obfuscation: 'Oh, it's too complicated; if I explained it to you I'd be giving my competitors an edge.' "

Branscum, the former Treasury agent, said successful Ponzi schemers are low key and not audacious spenders like Rothstein.

Sensing the inevitable collapse of his scheme, Rothstein apparently resorted to a common exit strategy: take the money and run, Branscum and Zuckoff said. After jetting to Morocco in October, he wired $15 million to a bank there, but came home after just a week. He was arrested Dec. 1.

"The idea of being an international fugitive, that is no life,'' Branscum said. "You are not going to take the money and run successfully. You are going to be hounded constantly.''

Database editors Dana Williams and John Maines contributed to this report.

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